A persistent argument about the use of artificial intelligence in the real estate industry is that there will soon be a clear divide between agents who use AI and those who do not.
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However, research consistently shows that the majority of real estate agents are already leveraging AI to some degree. According to interviews with multiple industry experts, the real gap is between agents who have adopted AI tools and those who have restructured their workflows around AI tools in an increasingly challenging market.
Everyone is using AI, but not everyone is using it correctly
A February 2026 survey of 225 National Association of Realtors members by Realtors Property Resource found an 82 percent AI adoption rate.
In NAR’s own 2025 study, drawn from a much larger random sample, the number was 68%. This gap likely reflects a spike over six months, but the direction is the same. Adoption is nearly universal.
Cameron Walker, who manages a network of real estate agents at Clever Offers and tracks agent performance metrics across major markets, said the adoption numbers are more obscure than they reveal. The number of adoptions only tells half the story. How agents deploy AI is more important than whether they deploy AI.
“Right now it’s all about speed,” Walker told Inman.
Walker noted that RPR’s 2026 data shows that 68 percent of agents are using AI to save at least one hour per week, and 34 percent are saving four or more hours.
“Most of this time is used to speed up response to leads,” he said. “A two-minute response from an agent is better than a two-hour response every time, and AI enables that first response.”
Walker’s focus is not just on deploying AI, but on transforming it.
According to NAR’s 2025 Technology Survey, 17 percent of agents reported that AI had a significant positive impact on their operations, another 33 percent reported a moderate positive impact, and 46 percent reported no noticeable impact.
“The bottom line is that success doesn’t just come from buying tools. Success comes from rebuilding your strategy around the tools,” Walker said. “Agents in our network treat AI as a lead-enablement tool, not a novelty, and are the ones whose volume has remained stable even as the market has shrunk.”
An agent who built a second business with AI
Andrew Fortune, who has been a real estate broker in Colorado Springs, Colorado for 14 years, is one agent who says AI has unlocked scale he couldn’t build manually.
“I use AI in everything I do in my business,” Fortune told Inman. “I used it to set up Google AdWords campaigns and spent time analyzing and adjusting my campaigns to improve performance. I rely heavily on AI to research and create new content for thousands of web pages and blog posts.”
His success with AI tools led him to start a second company, Peak 5 Digital, to help improve the ranks of other agents by creating content for their websites. Using AI, Fortune has also been able to expand its operations from Colorado Springs to Denver.
“We’ve been planning it for over 10 years, but the task was too big,” he said. “Now I feel like I can deal with it and be successful.”
Fortune said the agents he’s currently struggling with are doing a good job.
“They’re doing everything manually in a highly leveraged market,” he says. “This is fine when transactions are plentiful, but when transactions are low, manual agents spend all day doing tasks that the AI handles in the background, leaving them with little time to actually talk to clients.”
Fortune acknowledges that AI can’t replace relationships and local knowledge, but says it could have a dramatic impact on lead generation, which is central to real estate businesses.
“You just have more time to spend on the part of the job that actually closes a lot of deals,” he said.
“The main issue is speed.”
Natalia Vasova, a licensed real estate agent and owner of Resort Real Estate in Summit County, Colorado, believes agents are not losing out to AI, but rather to other agents who choose to use AI alongside their local knowledge base.
“The main problem is speed,” Bassova told Inman. “Even before attending a customer’s first property meeting, AI can perform competitive market analysis, draft listing copies, market the property in a fraction of the time it takes a human to do these tasks, and send a filtered list of properties based on criteria entered by the buyer when a new property is published.”
As far as customer retention is concerned, Basova said that customers usually do not make purchasing decisions in a hurry. It can take anywhere from 6 to 18 months from the time a potential buyer first contacts her office to the time a final contract is signed.
“During this period, our customers have more opportunities to travel to and from Summit County and conduct site visits before purchasing a home,” she said. “Unfortunately, without a CRM system that tracks every relationship you maintain with your customers, you run the risk of losing track of them during this long process.”
Basova said that if they lose contact with a customer within this period, they will eventually contact and hire the last agent they had contact with.
“We use AI to create a profile for each buyer and generate customized communications that continue to engage them throughout their search,” she said.
For example, if one of her Houston-based buyers contacts her in January to say she’s interested in buying in Silverthorne, Colo., they use AI tools to start sending targeted updates via email, phone call, and text message from February through May.
“This allows our clients to stay engaged with our team without having to recreate the conversation with each subsequent interaction,” Basova said. “By the time a customer schedules a visit to review properties they are interested in purchasing, we have already established an existing relationship with them.”
“It’s like competing with one hand tied behind your back.”
Walker cites a Gallup study that found technology employees who rarely use AI are three times more likely to be fired than those who use AI frequently. He argues that this pattern is playing out in the real estate industry through slower, less visible mechanisms. No one fires self-employed agents. The market will do it for them.
“When part-time and low-volume agents are squeezed and agents are competing in an already tough market, refusing to use AI is like competing with one hand tied behind your back,” Walker said. “Agents that will survive the next two years will be those that let AI do the quick work and paperwork, while spending time on the human element that closes deals.”
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